The Girl and the Rickshaw

Hooray, a short story published in Magic Cat Press called 'The Girl and the Rickshaw'. Click here to have a read. The story is inspired by my year spent in India and the many rickshaw journeys I took around Bangalore, though the girl is definitely not me! This is a funny old story, the few people that have read it have generally said that they felt let down by the ending. I guess Magic Cat Press didn't feel that way as otherwise they wouldn't have accepted it, but if anybody out there does read it, I'd be hugely grateful for some feedback!

Happy new year!

New year's Resolutions....Hmmm.....Stop yelling at my kids so much in the morning?? Deep breaths before I think I'm going to blow a fuse? Poor kids, it's not their fault they have to go to school and we have to be out the house by silly-o'clock. More patience please, new-year's-resolution fairy!

But as for writing resolutions, well I have a very simple one really, and that is to be far more disciplined on my thursday writing day. Email OFF, phone OFF, twitter OFF and more focus. It worked really well this past thursday, so I just need to keep it up. I have also started a little 'magpie' book, collecting little snippets of interesting facts / conversation / images /  ideas etc from my day which may someday be able to work their way into a story. Yesterday for example I had my hair cut by a lady with black hair with white stripes in it, so that went down in my book: 'zebra hair'. Also, she had a very prominent tattoo on her forearm so I decided to ask her about it rather than just look at it. She told me that she had it done just after her daughter was born and the tattoo spelt out her name. Brilliant - a zebra-haired hairdresser with Ivanka tattooed on her arm. Love it.

Kindle or kindle wood?

Ok, this is a little bit scary to be admitting this, particularly committing these words to paper (or the screen, I should say), but I am considering getting a kindle at some point in the not too murky future. Eek, I've said it. I say 'considering', because I really don't know if I've even come to terms with this 'consideration', let alone going out and buying one. But have a look at this graph above and you might see why I am in the process of considering the consideration of a kindle!! The yellow line represents physical books sold since 1996 and the red line shows the sales of Kindle books sold since 2008. This is utterly unprecedented. Kindle's have revolutionized the way we read and whilst I love, now forever and always the look, smell and feel of books, I have also got to acknowledge that people are reading very differently to how they were just ten years ago.

What does this mean for me and my novel? Actually, this could be exciting for me, because if nothing happens   when I go down the traditional publishing route, the good news is that I can publish an Amazon e-book for people to download on to their Kindle's. Anyone can do that, so the key to this is good marketing (aside from a darn good read). So I figured, the best way to get a feel for this market is to embrace it and that means getting a kindle. I chatted to a lady on the train not so long ago who was reading from a kindle and she told me she was the biggest die-hard book lover on the planet but is now a convert to the kindle. I have to say, I don't really want to be a 'convert', I just love physical books far too much. But what I do want to do is try to be a little more open-minded and embrace the digital revolution. It may well prove the only way for me to get my book out there.

Writing about sex!

Blimey. That was hard. I spent FAR more time than I'd intended this morning writing a sex scene in my novel. I had been an utter wimp when I originally wrote it, more a case of moving-swiftly-on and then suddenly it was the next morning - hmm, not very convincing. Thankfully, help was at hand exactly when I needed it in the form of an article in Mslexia by Monique Roffey (her sexually explit novel, above, came out earlier this year to great critical acclaim and a good dose of controversy) on how to write good sex scenes and one of the main things that I got out of it was that I have to kill the critic sitting on my shoulder. Don't think about what your mum might think or how I couldn't possibly write that or what on earth would so-and-so think if they knew I was writing this???!! But kill then, kill them all, brush them all off your shoulder and write that sex scene. Who put what where, who did what, and how. Yes, seriously!

Soooo....how did I fare? God, I had no idea what a prude I was, I guess I'm just not used to 'letting go' like this in my writing. I'm definitely not as liberated as Monique Roffey, but at least I've made a start. And I suppose that writing about sex, just like having it, takes practice. Tee hee.

Nan Green

Nan Green 

1904-1984

On my research travels for my novel, I've unearthed some really fascinating characters. I've just finished reading a book called 'Doves of War' by Paul Preston which is the biography of four women (two British and two Spanish) whose lives were all profoundly affected by the events of the Spanish Civil War. One of these British women was Nan Green, a young, working class married woman with two children. She loved walking and music and was utterly devoted to her family. But in 1937, Nan agonised for weeks before taking the decision to leave her children in a boarding school in England so that she could join her husband in war-torn Spain.

As a mother, I can understand the anguish she must have felt to be separated from her young children, but what it is harder for me to understand (for I, thankfully, live in a time of relative peace) is what drove her far from home to fight in a war that was not her own. The ideals of the droves of International Brigades and nurses who flocked into Spain between 1936 and 1939 were so strong - these were not adventure-seekers, they were men and women who truly believed that if they could fight and defeat fascism on Spanish soil, a larger war could be averted. And although they did not succeed in Spain, their ideal lives on.

Nan Green helped countless people in Spain, nursing hundreds of injured people and helping take refugees to Mexico at the end of the war. She returned to England with her husband 'missing.' After tortuous weeks of waiting, she had to break the news to her children and his parents that he wasn't coming back...

...one of the many inspiring, forgotten voices who wove her passion for liberty and human dignity into her work.

Tree

My eldest daughter in the magnolia tree outside our house this spring

A fantastic source of motivation for my writing has, for years, been through Mslexia - a magazine for women who write. It comes out 4 times a year and with each new publication there is a call for short stories or poems on a given theme and I try as often as I can to submit. For the current edition, they're asking for stories on the theme '2211', ie looking forward two hundred years and being inspired from that point. Initially I thought ugh, science fiction, not my forte at all. But I quickly realised that was very defeatist of me, and more to the point, I should know by now that the chosen entries are always very wide-ranging and the theme can be interpreted very broadly; it just needs to serve as inspirational springboard.

Anyway, I spent a while pondering the theme and came up with an idea with a tree a part of the principle narrative (not going to go into it here, just in case somebody nicks my idea, tee hee!). But after deciding that, we were sitting at lunch one day and I was telling my family about the theme and asked everybody 'What do you think the world will be like in 200 years time?' My eldest daughter (age 5), without even stopping to think about it, looked at me and in a very serious little voice, replied 'There won't be any trees.' I was stunned - firstly that the idea of trees had come to her immediately since that's what I was going to use anyway, but also that she had quite such an apocalyptic, or should I say bleak vision for the future. Where did this come from? I think I must talk about our need to protect our planet more than I realise. And whilst I am really, really pleased that she is taking this on board, I also don't want to overburden the little love and want her to believe that things are heading in the right direction! Quite sobering.

In the meantime, I'm going to start penning my tale about my tree, and whilst I'm doing this, I want my children to be able to climb from branch to branch to their hearts' content. And I truly hope that in two hundred years time, our future generations will be able to do the same.

Wise words

'I cannot help thinking that to entertain is sufficient ambition for the novelist, and it is certainly one which is hard to achieve; if he can tell a good story and create characters that are fresh and living he has done enough to make the reader grateful. You will not have failed to notice that many novels are written which have every possible excellence and yet are quite unreadable. I hope you will not think it a willful eccentricity when I tell you that I look upon readableness as the highest merit that a novel can have.'


W Somerset Maugham